Zionist Collaboration with Germany’s Nazi Government

PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent claim that the Mufti of Jerusalem was the person who inspired Hitler to kill the Jews has had the predictable effect of bringing the past back to life. This past includes the well-documented history of the Zionist movement’s collaboration with Hitler’s government inside Germany and all over eastern Europe, before and during World War II.

This is not a recent issue. Several decades of research have uncovered a wealth of information on this relationship.

Today, Netanyahu’s attempt to stain the Palestinian people collectively, comes in the form of a challenge and warning to the West. The warning is that Israel will never accept the international borders it has been allocated by the UN and will settle for nothing less than the whole of historic Palestine. The challenge is: Let anyone try to force us to settle with the Palestinians, who were “friends with Hitler,” because Hitler after all “didn’t want to kill Jews, but only to expel them” before the Mufti somehow “put the idea in his head.”

The goal of this historical revisionism is of course not history as such, but simply to undermine Palestinian and international resolve by burning more bridges. Nevertheless, his brazen attempt to stain the Palestinian people with Nazi crimes should be construed against its proper historical context. With his comments on the Mufti of Jerusalem he has unwittingly brought to the fore a period in Zionist history about which many Jews have chosen to remain silent.

Numerous documents, diaries and court verdicts archived at the Israel’s postwar Supreme Court provide unambiguous evidence that the Zionist leaders not only took part in the illegal expulsion of Jewish communities, but encouraged them in hopes of populating their colony in Palestine. In exchange they sold the Nazis, among other things, sensitive intelligence gathered from their dealings with the British mandate authorities in Palestine.

The Zionist movement’s active participation and encouragement in what happened to the Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary and other parts of eastern Europe have been an established fact since at least the 1960s. The trail of Zionist collaboration with the Nazi government and local fascist tyrants is long and has been well documented. I can’t even begin to summarize it, but let me start with the Jewish Agency For Palestine.

The Jewish Agency For Palestine signed a so-called “Transfer Agreement” with the Germany’s Nazi government. This agreement referred to the expulsion of Jews to the nascent Zionist colony in Palestine. Similar documents still exist in the archives. Hannah Arendt, who was neither anti-Israeli nor pro-Palestinian, gives some details on this particular agreement. But she does something else also. She describes the utmost respect and politeness with which Zionist leaders, still a minority among Jews at the time, were received in both Germany and Austria by Nazi ministers. German authorities considered the Zionists, she explained, as the “decent Jews.”

Her depiction stands to reason, besides being well-supported by the available evidence, because Zionist race ideology was actually the ancestor and inspiration of the Nazi movement. Hitler in his biography, Mein Kampf, and the Nazi intellectuals who later defended the Third Reich, adulated Jewish race theorists and Zionists for their “unique sense of race consciousness.” Zionism essentially provided the ideological model the Pan-German movement had been missing. Zionism provided the focal point for gathering the Volk for its “historic” mission.

This turned out to be a two-way street, to the misfortune of the Jewish people.

While the still non-Zionist American Jewish community was struggling to organize boycotts of German products, the Zionists were drying the ink on agreements signed to expel Jews from Germany. But how the “transfer” was done is another story in itself.

As is well known by historians, and as a German Jewish woman and survivor of Thersienstadt mentioned in her book, all leading positions in the Reichsvereinigung, in particular, were not only held by Zionists but were approved by the Nazis.

Nazi government minister Eichmann revealed at his trial, after his kidnapping to Israel, that the Gestapo and the S.S. received a stream of emissaries from the nascent Zionist colony in Palestine “on their own initiative” in order to accelerate the illegal immigration of Jews to British-occupied Palestine. In this, the British government is known to have been complicit. Eichmann even went to Vienna to negotiate with them about the issue of Jewish deportation.

The Zionist leaders were always treated with utmost respect and recognition. It was in everyone’s interest: the Nazi government depended on the Zionists to help in the deportations, the Zionists depended on it to colonize Palestine.

One witness at the Eichmann trial told of how Jews, believing the Zionist lies, volunteered to go to the Auschwitz concentration camp from Thersienstadt and denounced fellow Jews who did not share their views. One collaborator in this evil scheme was Chaim Rumkowski (or Chaim I, the so-called Eldest of the Jews in Lodz). This well-known and vainglorious Zionist collaborator had been issuing currency notes bearing his signature and postage stamps with his portrait, riding around in a broken-down horse-drawn carriage.

In his verdict on criminal case no. 124 of 1953 at Israel’s District Court of Jerusalem, Judge Benjamin Halevi wrote:

“The masses of Jews from Hungary’s ghettos obediently boarded the deportation trains without knowing their fate. They were full of confidence in the false information that they were being transferred to Kenyermeze. The Nazis could not have misled the masses of Jews so conclusively had they not spread their false information through Jewish channels. The false information was spread by the Jewish leaders. The local leaders of the Jews of Kluj and Nodvarod knew that other leaders were spreading such false information and did not protest.”

Even if one pretends that not all Zionists knew the fate of these deportees, the vital assistance they provided the Nazi authorities with shows not mere incompetence, but rather the depth of their conviction that any means was justifiable to achieve their end: colonization. But the Zionists leaders were fully aware.

Another Zionist collaborator was a Jewish policeman who worked arduously “to make the deportations easier” by selecting the Jewish victims himself and transferring those who were needed in Palestine. (H. Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” 117-9).

This went on all around. The deniers of the Zionist holocaust cannot hide one of the most notorious cases of Zionist collaboration, that of Rudolf Kastner. He negotiated for the “purchase of Jewish lives for money and military equipment,” equipment headed for Palestine to kill “Arabs.” Records tell that he personally selected the Jews to be “saved.” Judge Halevi wrote in his verdict that “[Kastner] considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism.”

Incredibly, Kastner was later rehabilitated by the Israeli Supreme Court, even though he had gone so far as to promise Eichmann to stay quiet about a plan at the time to gas around a million Jews. He even perjured himself at his testimony after the war, as the judge took pains also to mention. It is said that Eichmann had not only agreed to let him take Jews fit for the Zionist colony out of Eichmann’s hands, but dressed him up in S.S. uniform and took him to Belsen to do what he had to do.

During the war, the <a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Zionist_Organization”>World Zionist Organization</a> maintained offices inside as well as outside Nazi Europe. This allowed it to built a vast international network of intelligence. It oversaw even the illegal “armies” that the Zionists had been building in Palestine. Despite its underground intelligence, it never publicized the mass murder of Jews or mounted any effort to support Jewish resistance in Europe.

Jewish resistance was not something to sneeze at in places, despite the lack of arms. The Nazis had a terrible time demolishing the Warsaw Ghetto, one of the largest, but no thanks to any Zionist organization. Not a finger was lifted officially in defense of their people.

True, a large number of Zionists did take part in the Warsaw battles, but most Jewish resistance fighters were Communists and Bundists. Moreover, the Zionists’ preferred military strategy quickly became “legendary”: Masada-like last stands. The idea was not to defend their people but to demonstrate their “heroism.”

In Palestine, meanwhile, the armed underground Haganah, which coordinated with the Nazis, tied down large numbers of British soldiers with acts of terrorism and mayhem. Their activities included systematic attacks against the local population to provoke chaos. Zionists worked best under chaotic conditions. Much information can be found in Klaus Polkein’s “The Secret Contacts: Zionist-Nazi Relations, 1933,1941,” Journal of Palestine Studies (spring-summer 1976).

Whereas the tiny terrorist gang Irgun (to which Menachem Begin belonged) proposed an outright alliance with the Nazi government, the more “mainstream” Haganah kept secret intelligence links with that government. Its commander, Feivel Polkes, cravenly passed on critical information to Adolf Eichmann of the security service of the S.S. The records (Reichs Führer of the S.S., Heinrich Himmler, nicrofil RFSS, frames 2936012 to 2936069) reveal Polkes’ offer of sensitive intelligence information during his visit to Berlin from February 26 to March 2, 1937.

These German records show the extent and manner in which the Haganah’s and other Zionist organizations’ relationship revolved around the Nazi policy of Judenreine, purification from Jews, which referred to the brisk trade in Jews being organized by the Gestapo.

As the war wore on, the threats to Jews all over Nazi-occupied Europe deepened. But the Zionist movement stood at the very heart of European Jewry’s collapse. Although this genocidal campaign began with the “transfers,” it of course evolved into something else. But the one constant was the Zionists’ continual encouragement of the Nazi authorities for the sole purpose of filling their colony in Palestine.

After the war, in Feb. 1961, in the London Daily Herald, a Dr. Rudulf Verba (a camp survivor) pointed accusingly and witheringly at Zionist leaders, saying, “I am a Jew. In spite of that–indeed because of that–I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war.”

These voices have been echoing for decades but seem to have been willfully forgotten. The context of Verba’s above accusation is shocking. His camp diary, where he recorded many important goings-on, indicate without a shadow of a doubt that, unlike most Germans, Europeans and Americans, Zionist leaders actually knew what was being done to the Jews. They chose to take part in the crimes but stayed silent and lied to their own kind.

Worse, the same records clearly demonstrate that they insisted not only on the deportations but also the killing of countless Jews who refused to accept their insane ideology and racial fairy tales.

Hitler did not need the Mufti of Jerusalem to push him to genocide. He had the Zionist movement.

And the story does not end there. Netanyahu’s comments take to a new height Norman Finkelstein’s argument in “The Holocaust Industry” about how the Zionists have exploited the “Holocaust” to their own advantage after WWII. Zionists have been using the tragedy of the Jews and turning it into a veritable cash-cow, extorting vast sums money for their presently failing project in Palestine–e.g., their plunder with help from the US in the 1990s and early 2000s of German, Swiss and Austrian banks.

They demanded those funds (billions of dollars above the reparations already paid) on the pretext of compensation for slave labor, including non-Jews, who never received a cent. Although these funds were claimed mainly on behalf of the Nazi Jewish victims, those victims continue to languish in poverty in Israel and elsewhere. Only a miniscule fraction has ever reached them. The German government knows about this but has chosen to remain silent to avoid more blackmail from American Zionists.

Countless witness accounts, documents, diaries, etc. support the Zionist role in the Nazi campaign “to rid Europe of the Jews.” The trail is long. One wonders if today’s leaders of international Zionist organizations and of Israel have a single tear to shed about their betrayal of Jews at their darkest hour.

If the older Zionists were capable of committing such horrendous crimes against their own people and of swindling them on such a scale, God knows what those in power are capable of doing to the Palestinians, not to mention the rest of the region.

Dr. Anthony F. Shaker is a visiting scholar at McGill University. He has published several scholarly books in philosophy, including Thinking in the Language of Reality, and writes articles on contemporary politics and strategic issues relating especially to the Middle East.